Buildings, in particular office buildings, include various enclosures for housing telecommunication equipment and associated connectors, such as patch panels and switches. Intricate pathworks of cables connect the electrical equipment and connectors. Cables connect electrical equipment located in a main equipment room to telecommunications equipment located in telecommunications rooms on different floors, for example. Cables associated with the telecommunications equipment also extend into additional enclosures positioned in strategically placed zones throughout the different floors to establish electrical connections, such as ethernet connections.
These enclosures, often called “zone boxes.” house Ethernet connectivity, such as switches and patch panels, adapted to receive cabling extending from the telecommunications equipment, positioned in locations remote from the zone boxes. Cables, typically copper cables, within the zone box connect the various switches and patch panels. Additional cables may extend out of the zone box to specific work or coverage areas, to establish connections with a mix of local devices, such as personal computers, printers, workstations and certain video cameras.
Recent increases in bandwidth requirements for telecommunication and other systems have resulted in more densely packed equipment and an increased number of cables per piece of equipment than prior systems. Equipment, such as Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches in zone boxes, can overheat and become damaged when there is no organized route for the cables to follow that keeps them from interfering with air flow.
There is a need, therefore, for a horizontal cable slack manager that routes and stores cable slack in an organized way.